Individuals and businesses alike frequently require help (e.g., customer service) for products and/or services. For instance, an individual can require technical assistance when inquiring about an online service. As an example, a business manager can need help from an online survey service to explain how to set up and manage a digital survey to be sent to customers. Oftentimes, online service providers offer technical assistance to customers by way of an online chat interface. In some conventional systems, and with the advent of natural language processing, many online service providers utilize automated response generators to provide responses to chat questions. While conventional automated response generators provide some benefits, conventional systems have several disadvantages.
For example, conventional systems create a sense of detachment in users because conventional systems generate responses having characteristics that indicate the response is computer generated, thus leaving a user feeling frustrated and devalued due to the impersonal communication. In other words, conventional systems often generate a response that has a robotic and formulaic structure that is much different than the tone and structure of actual human interaction. In addition, many conventional systems generate responses that have significant sentence structure errors, spelling errors, or other errors that make the response confusing or unintelligible. Accordingly, many conventional systems lack the ability to create a positive interaction with a customer due to the various characteristics that clearly indicate a response is computer generated.
Additionally, conventional systems are often ineffective at providing accurate responses to chat questions. Particularly, conventional systems frequently provide generated responses with little or no relevance to the chat question posed by a user. For example, conventional systems often create a response that includes words out of order so that a user cannot understand what the response is supposed to mean. In other cases, and because conventional systems are based on a formulaic structure, the responses that conventional systems are capable of creating are often short and discrete segments of information. These short and discrete responses fail to provide adequate or accurate information in response to a user's question. Based on the above technical limitations with conventional systems, a user often has to rephrase an answer in hopes of generating a different response, or in other cases, the user often has to ask many questions to obtain an answer in small discrete segments.
Furthermore, many conventional systems require reprogramming to the response generator systems, methods, and algorithms to change how the conventional system generates a response. For example, administrators or programmers update conventional systems based on changing terminology, changing services (e.g., new or updated services), changing products (e.g., new or updated products), changing policies, and/or changing technology. Changing the programming systems of conventional systems is technically challenging and often results in errors, unintended system consequences, and bugs that can cause conventional systems to crash. Accordingly, conventional systems are often unstable, unpredictable, and difficult to update.
Thus, there are several disadvantages with regard to conventional automated chat response systems.